Overview

Factory Futures began in Ivrea in 2011 as a research programme examining the physical consequences of an increasingly digital economy.

Its subject was the data centre.

Its setting was the former Olivetti industrial complex: one of the clearest European examples of an industrial culture in which architecture, production, labour and landscape had been treated as parts of the same project.

The contrast was deliberate.

Data centres were becoming larger, more energy intensive and more important to everyday life, while containing almost no people and attracting very little architectural attention.

The question

Industrial architecture had historically been shaped by the relationship between people and production.

The data centre disrupted that relationship.

Here was a building whose primary occupant was machinery, whose internal environment was defined almost entirely by technical requirements, and whose effect on energy systems, land and infrastructure extended far beyond the number of people inside it.

The research therefore began with a question that would later become central to Factory Futures:

What does architecture mean when a building has almost no one inside it, but affects everyone around it?

Research approach

Two international design programmes were held within the former Olivetti ICO factory.

Building for Big Data, in 2012, approached modular data centres as a manufacturing problem.

Students worked with digital fabrication, locally available production systems and an ABB industrial robot. Rather than beginning with architectural form, the work began with material dimensions, machine capabilities and a fixed production sequence.

The production process became a design constraint.

Architecture Without Humans, in 2013, moved from fabrication to aggregation.

The work began with the dimensional, environmental and energy requirements of modular data centre units and used computational methods to test how those units might combine into larger architectural systems.

The question was no longer how to design a façade around technical equipment, but how the logic of the equipment itself could generate architecture.

Both programmes concluded with public exhibitions in Olivetti’s Salone dei 2000, placing emerging digital infrastructure inside one of Europe’s most significant spaces of industrial production.

What emerged

The research established a way of working that has remained surprisingly consistent.

Begin with the production system.

Understand the dimensions, energy flows, logistics and interfaces.

Determine what can repeat.

Allow architectural form to emerge from those relationships rather than being imposed on them afterwards.

Fourteen years later, that logic sits behind much of Factory Futures’ work on reference design, modular construction and AI infrastructure.

The technologies have changed.

The underlying question has not.